Edgwyn

Ladyonthemoon, as I stated earlier in this thread, I grew up playing games well before automap. I like automap. If your opinion of my work ethic is based on my approach to playing computer games, I think that you may want to question your judgement. I play computer games for fun. I have plenty of time at work each day to do calculations, research products and techniques and do other difficult things, so I read for fun and I play computer games for fun. If you believe that the only way to play computer games is to make maps with pencil and paper and have perma-death, then that is what you must enjoy. I don't.

They are really just a bunch of bureaucrats so the best that you will find are empire records and papers for Fort Remote

It certainly looks old when compared to Skyrim or Fortnite or any of their peers, but it does not look that bad compared to mobile games which are played by the same demographic. Queens Wish's graphics are not hugely better than the older games, but there are a lot of interface improvements that I think make the re-mastered games more enjoyable to play, and more accessible, such as the junk bag and the auto mapping.

I may be mis-remembering this, but wasn't there something in early D&D or AD&D lore where orcs were poorly executed duplicates of the elves created by the evil deities and perhaps the same with Dwarves/Goblins and Halflings/Kobolds?

Slartibus, I will agree that the changes in AD&D material was definitely not as abrupt as I stated in my first post in this sub thread (one of you all might want to split this topic out, because we are far from Solberg's original topic), but I do believe that there is plenty of evidence, including in your statements that reducing offense was a factor in several of the decisions that TSR and then WoTC made over the past 40 years, if not as abruptly in the 10 year lift of an edition.

Business is pretty much all about following the money. Most movies are not self funded, and so the people who are providing the funding for the artists to create their art are doing so with the expectation of a return on their investment. An individual in their basement can paint, write music, create computer or pen and paper games, write a book, or otherwise follow their artistic passion on whatever path it leads them. But as soon as they decide to monetize that passion (say to support a wife, two kids, and a tarantula), they have to decide where their comfort level is on the spectrum between pleasing the most number of people (and not offending potential customers is a good start) and keeping their artistic integrity. We have rules on these forums (which I think are good) that can be distilled down to don't offend the casual reader. I do not have the time right now to search through Jeff's blogs to see if he has given the why on how the character artwork has changed in its depiction of females between the Exile series (whose re-makes have kept the same art) and the newer series like Avadon and Queen's Wish. Slartibus, Kelandon or one of the other mods may know off of the top of their heads though. Irrespective of the creator's artistic vision, there would not have been a second, better funded, movie in a trilogy, if a whole bunch of us had not watched the first movie in the theaters multiple times and bought the toys, t-shirts, and comic books. That convinced the business to fund the artist for two more movies to finish the first trilogy of their vision. By the time the second trilogy came around, the artist was pretty much free of the constraints of needing to please anyone, because he and his financial backers knew that they would make money anyway (plus if he really wanted to, he could self fund) and so we ended up with what many of us consider a bad trilogy from the original artist and a bad trilogy from new artists. Of course that middle trilogy may very well be a case where the unfiltered artistic expression prevailed over the tastes of the consumers.

Slartibus, I think that you are being overly specific on your definition of change due to offense. Yes, I remember seeing poorly duplicated screeds left on the shelf of the local B. Dalton or Walden Books where they had their AD&D material that told me that I was going to commit suicide and rot in hell in no particular order. The BADD folks were offended by Demons, Devils and what was mostly line art of naked and semi naked women. TSR addressed these issues at different times and to different degrees (sometimes only temporarily). My interpretation of your point is that since TSR's intended audience (generalized as nerdy straight teenage boys of which I was one) actually enjoyed those aspects that TSR did not make any changes out of offense but made changes to avoid law suits. That seems to be a lot narrower than your original statement. Ultimately the satanic panic and similar items were due to people being offended by various things (including Heavy Metal like you mention), and I choose to believe that some of the panicers seized on suicide to increase the offense. Law suit and copy right issues came up pretty quickly, I had the early printing of AD&D first edition Dieties and Demigods which I believe has two extra pantheons that TSR did not fully secure the rights to and so were eliminated in the later printings within the first edition. There was lots of Tolkien inspiration/plagiarism (Halflings and their tribe names and Rangers are pretty specific) that had to be adjusted as well. While I certainly was incorrect in when TSR/WoTC reduced the prevalence of female nudity/semi-nudity, your own statement support the statement that WoTC is worried that players or perspective players will be offended by the prevalence of female nudity. The whole reason that I included female as a modifier for nudity in my original comment was because of how one sided it was in the 1970s/1980s material. Finally, while I had the original Oriental Adventures book, I do not recall any of my friends of Asian backgrounds objecting to it at the time. Certainly in retrospect there are some very problematic aspects to the book, but this was at a time when you could still make a movie like Blazing Saddles.

These two examples are exactly what I was thinking of. There was a lot of female nudity and armor bikinis in the 1st edition and the materials that proceeded it, which was very typical of fantasy artwork at the time, but has been toned down since.

Of course AD&D has modified some things with each edition to make them less offensive. The original material that several of us grew up on is now less offensive in some ways, but very offensive in other ways. Ultimately, Gary Gygax and company were targeting a certain demographic (of which I was a part) with their games, just like modern game designers do. The story telling that is required in any addition of D&D or similar games is very similar to what was required in the early text adventure games.

Thank you and Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

My opinion is that your opinion is the only one that matters as long as you do not make it competitive. By competitive I mean, "look I completed the game in one hour on torment, how come you guys are so slow" when you exploited bugs or edited your party or used on-line hints (including those in these forums) or map resources, or whatever. Of the four items that I listed there, and there are of course others that I did not list, you get to decided what is fair and what is not fair. After all, the point of playing these games is to have fun, not to beat your self up. I am currently playing a game from another manufacturer that I only enjoy with the help of extensive cheats. I have made a decision on what cheats that I was going to use and what ones I wasn't going to use in order to meet my goal for the game. I will be happy when I have completed my goal, but I am not going to post about the giant empire that I created on Redit or Discord because I did not do it while playing within the bounds of the accepted rules.

Some of the inconsistencies you can try to explain away by the fact that Avadon is in many ways a secret society and has deliberately obscured its own history. From an organizational sense, the council setting up a system where whoever killed the last keeper gets to be the new keeper would be a very poor decision because it eliminates the council's power over the keeper. I suppose that since the council members do not trust each other that this could have been a deliberate way to take it out of their hands, but it still seems like an unlikely decision to me. Later on with the Keeper of Avadon becoming excessively powerful, the council may have lost their ability to control Avadon and it is possible that during one of the transition times after a Keeper died that the council appointed someone who Avadon rejected and put in their own keeper. This type of action could certainly lead to a lot of internal conflict with the killing of several keepers in a short time. No organization that is trying to appear respectable wants to advertise that it has slipped the bonds of its makers (the council) and so Avadon may well publish materials that say that the council still appoints the Keeper while it is an open secret inside Avadon that whoever kills the Keeper is the next Keeper. Avadon as an organization is certainly falling apart as it is very desperate for new recruits from outside the organization to come in and save it.

While I typically went to 16 to get each spell, I almost never cast anything beyond what level 13 will get you. If you are trying to save some levels to invest elsewhere, and depending on difficulty level you can probably stop at 13.

I think that the tool tip may carry over from older games and mechanics. Per discussions on these boards and some experimentation on my part, caster level determines if you can learn a spell at all and then to read the level three spell book for a spell, you need a certain combination of Arcane Lore, Sage Lore, Vahnatai Lore, and two objects. Not to mention that for certain of the books you need particular levels of Move Mountains, Dispel Barrier, Clearances or quest steps to just get to the barrier. I believe that there are four spell books that Sage Lore does not help with, one of which requires 11 Arcane Lore to read. Those same four spell books due not receive the bonus from Vahnatai Lore.

There are also some spells that Sage Lore does not work for learning the level 3 version. There are not a lot of them and you can get by without them, but they exist.

It looks like the custom titles are back, I am happy to see them.

I would love to see remakes of Nethergate and A4-6, but I am not sure that there is going to be enough time for all of that in Jeff's plans

My reading tends to be lighter. I am currently reading David Drake and Eric Flint's Bellisarius series. David Drake really likes ancient Mediterranean cultures and it is interesting so far.

Slartibus, I had forgotten about the Sleeths from Gamma World. I had a fair amount of the original Gamma World material (not the even older Metamorphosis Alpha), but didn't really ever play it. Thinking back now, I think that there was a lizardish race in Star Frontiers as well which came out 3-5 years later, but again, my memory of that is not as good as it is of the AD&D 1st edition. In any case, Lizard men were not nearly as omni-present in fantasy or gaming as were Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Orcs and Goblins and choosing the Sliths did indeed help set Jeff apart. He also created a lot of back story and culture for them which was pretty much lacking in almost every source except Tolkien (who did not have Lizard men at all).

Mercuric plate might be at two locations. I would check the North West portion of the Lair of Athron in addition to the crafter at the Lava Peninsula near Erika's tower. According to my notes, Balorus at the Lava Peninsula sells it for 5400c.

AD&D module I2, published in the early 1980s did a little better job with the Lizardmen then most sources from that era. While they were certainly not identical to the Sliths, I do feel that there was some definite influence there, but I may be mis-remembering since it has been over 30 years since I have looked at the module last.

I had forgotten that, but Bruce Lee was the actor that I was thinking of, and who I believe had more of a cultural influence on the teens of the 1980s. Certainly to my friends and I at the time, Bruce Li and Jackie Chan were not the original. Not trying to take anything away from Jackie Chan's fantastic career and abilities.

I don't remember clothing styles being that well described in LOTR to determine if people were dressing in Elvish styles. In the real world, I am sure that we can all come up with examples from at least the last 150 years or so of Europeans and Americans adopting art, architecture and to some extent dress from other cultures and those other cultures adopting European and American dress and pop culture. With that said, I think that the difference in Exile/Avernum is that we are dealing with a group of people who have been cut off from their home society and put into a giant cave with minimal resources. Vahnatai styles are a way to survive: "If the Vahnatai have made it down here for the past 2000 years, maybe we can too. Oh wait, they hibernate for 1000 years at a time, well that is awkward." That Vahnatai cloak is warmer than my cave mushroom cloak and keeps the cave fleas off better so I am going to wear it.

Like Tri-Rodent I am very close in age to Jeff. From what I remember, there was generally less participation in/appreciation for Japanese pop culture, we were worried about economic domination. Animae and Manga were mostly in specialty stores, not Barnes and Noble and J-pop was very hard to find. Some people had watched Speed Racer and Star Blazers, but even that was rare. Asian weapons were popular, but most depictions of them made absolutely zero distinction between Japanese and Chinese culture with the rest of East Asia being completely left out. Shurikens, Katanas and Nunchaku were popular from B martial art movies (whose most famous actor was Chinese, not Japanese), Kris swords were somewhat rare, and of course are mostly from South Asia not East Asia anyway. I think that the Japanese influence is very slight. The mysterious culture thing has been applied to every unfamiliar culture (from a US/European perspective: North Africa, Africa, East Asia, South Asia Central Asia and Western Asia were all inhabited by mysterious cultures). I think that Jeff was looking to making the Vahnatai "Alien" with the definition of different, and so equipping them with Elvish cloaks, Japanese missile weapons, South Asian swords, and very vaguely Arabic architecture provided a large visual break from his typical Northern/Western European theme.

As your tank builds up their skills, you will be able to put that gear back on and still hit a reasonable amount of the time.